This week in Flutter #36: A new challenge from the Flutter team

A couple of years ago, the Flutter team announced the Flutter Clock Challenge. The goal was to build a clock face UI, using Flutter for the Lenovo Smart Clock. I had already used Flutter in production for some months, and I decided to give it a try.

I did not win. Looking at the clocks submitted by the others 🎦, it does not surprise me. Some of them are insanely beautiful. Some others are utterly complicated. It is also clear that there were teams who worked at the challenge. Working only a couple of hours on it, in some spare time, was not enough for me.

This week the Flutter team announced another challenge: the Flutter Puzzle Hack. I am not going to participate this time. There will be even more competition, and the time I can spend on it is not even remotely close to being enough to give me sufficient results.

If you want to participate, don’t do it for the prizes. Consider it as an opportunity to learn. Because you will learn a lot by doing something new. Unless you have a team and a lot of time to dedicate to it. Then you should probably go for the prizes.

- Michele Volpato

Development 🧑‍💻

🔗 Firebase for your Dart Web API

Do you know that you can connect to a Firebase project from Dart? Not Flutter, just Dart. Learn more about it in this article, by Aswin Gopinathan. In the article, Aswin implements a web server using Dart, but you can use the same method to connect to Firebase via a pure Dart script.

🔗 Dart and Functional Programming: applying Haskell concepts with dartz

I am a fan of functional programming. The fact that you can, probably, prove that your code does precisely what you want is a big feature. In this new article by Juan Belieni, you’ll learn how to apply some constructs belonging to Haskell to Dart, using the dartz package.

🔗 Dart Functors, Applicatives, And Monads In Pictures

And on the subject of functional programming, here is a translation of a popular Haskell article into Dart. By Oleksandr Leushchenko.

🔗 Caching a NetworkResponse from the dart http client using Hive

In this article, by The Ginger Geek, you’ll learn how to cache network responses to improve the performance of your app. It is a good exercise in case you already implemented a network layer that does not use a package with cache already built-in.

🔗 Comparing Flutter game engines

Are you considering building a new game using Flutter? You can create everything from scratch, and learn a lot while doing it, or use an existing engine, learn less, but finish your game within the end of the decade. Deven Joshi goes through all main Flutter game engines so that you do not have to. Pick the one that fits best with your game idea.

Others 🤷‍♂️

🔗 Announcing the Flutter Puzzle Hack!

The Flutter team announced a new hack challenge. After the clock challenge from a couple of years ago, this time it’s a puzzle hack! The competition will be quite high, given the growth Flutter had in the last two years. If you plan to participate, you should know that there are teams of developers and designers participating as well, and they’ll work on the project for hundred of hours. As Filip Hráček explains 🎦, if you hope to win, expect to be disappointed.

That’s it for this week. Will you participate in the Flutter Puzzle Hack? How much time and resources will you dedicate to it?

Let me know in the comments below.

That’s it for this week.

If you want to comment on any of this week’s entries, you can do it in the comment section below.

Have a bug-free week,

- Michele Volpato